Author: Elliot Williams

1432 Articles

The Nest: Album Release Hidden In A Rock

December 11, 2016 by 31 Comments

First there were vinyl records, then came cassettes, CDs, those failed audio-on-DVD formats, and then downloads. To quote the band, [Bateleur], “you can’t pay someone to take a CD these days.” So how do you release your new album? By hiding a Raspberry Pi in a semi-transparent fake rock on a mountainous cliff, and requiring a secret whistle to enable it, naturally.

Once activated, you’ll be able to plug into the USB port and download the album, or sit there on a remote hillside cliff overlooking the ocean and enjoy the new tunes. Because there’s a headphone jack in the rock, naturally. Besides being a cool hack, we think that putting people in the right physical and mental space for a serious listening is brilliant. Watch the video embedded below for an idea of the making of and a view from the site.

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Reverse Engineering An ST-Link Programmer

December 10, 2016 by 11 Comments

We’re not sure why [lujji] would want to hack ST’s ST-Link programmer firmware, but it’s definitely cool that he did, and his writeup is a great primer in hacking embedded devices in two parts: first he unpacks and decrypts the factory firmware and verifies that he can then upload his own encrypted firmware through the bootloader, and then he dumps the bootloader, figures out where it’s locking the firmware image, and sidesteps the protection.

[lujji]’s project was greatly helped out by having the firmware’s encryption keys from previous work by [Taylor Killian]. Once able to run his own code on an intact device, [lujji] wrote a quick routine that dumped the entire flash ROM contents out over the serial port. This gave him the bootloader binary, the missing piece in the two-part puzzle.

If you’ve ever broken copy protection of the mid-1990’s, you won’t be surprised what happened next. [lujji] located the routine where the bootloader adds in the read protection, and NOPped it out. After uploading firmware with this altered bootloader, [lujji] found that it wasn’t read-protected anymore. Game over!

We glossed over a couple useful tips and tricks along the way, so if you’re into reversing firmware, give [lujji]’s blog a look. If you just want a nice ARM programmer with UART capabilities, however, there’s no reason to go to these extremes. The Black Magic Probe project gives you equal functionality and it’s open source. Or given that the official ST-Link programmers are given away nearly free with every Nucleo board, just buying one is clearly the path of least resistance. But a nice hack like this is its own reward for those who want to take that path. Thanks, [lujji] for writing it up.

The 3D-Printed Mutoscope You’ve Always Wanted

December 10, 2016 by 10 Comments

[John] got his hands on a 3D printer, and did what any hacker with a new toy would, printed himself a Mutoscope. (A what?) A Mutoscope is an early flip-book based motion picture machine, and in this case it displays 24 frames from “A Clockwork Orange”. [John]’s 3D-printed machine is, not coincidentally we assume, printed in orange plastic.

The model for the frame is up on Thingiverse, but there’s not all that much to it, honestly. It’s a frame and a few wheels that hold some skewers in place. The rest of the work is making the flaps.

But getting to the end product wasn’t a straight walk. [John] describes all of the starts and stops in his blog, aptly named “Fail Try Again”. We like seeing the whole process rather than just the final, seventh, iteration of the device.

Where to take this project next? We want to see a design with a mounting bracket for a cheap stepper motor built in. We’ve always wanted our own custom signage, and there’s nothing cooler than the flap-flap-flap noise that flip book pages make when being switched. We must not be alone in thinking so, because we’ve seen two beautiful DIY builds in the last two years: this one done in multiples for advertising purposes and this one done just for the lulz. [John]’s project is a lot simpler, and thus a lot more accessible. We hope it inspires a few of you to make your own.

Retrotechtacular: The Incredible Machine

December 8, 2016 by 21 Comments

They just don’t write promotional film scripts like they used to: “These men are design engineers. They are about to engage a new breed of computer, called Graphic 1, in a dialogue that will test the ingenuity of both men and machine.”

This video (embedded below) from Bell Labs in 1968 demonstrates the state of the art in “computer graphics” as the narrator calls it, with obvious quotation marks in his inflection. The movie ranges from circuit layout, to animations, to voice synthesis, hitting the high points of the technology at the time. The soundtrack, produced on their computers, naturally, is pure Jetsons.

Highlights are the singing “Daisy Bell” at 9:05, which inspired Stanley Kubrick to play a glitchy version of the track as Dave is pulling Hal 9000’s brains out, symbolically regressing backwards through a history of computer voice synthesis which at that point in time was the present. (Whoah!)
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Akiba: Shenzhen In 30 Minutes

December 7, 2016 by 9 Comments

Multi-talented hacker extraordinaire and electrical engineer [Akiba] is based in Japan, and this makes it just a hop, skip, and a jump over to Shenzhen, China, the hardware capital of the world. He’s led a number of manufacturing tours aimed at acquainting hackers with the resources there, and now he’s giving you the benefit of his experience in a 30-minute video. It’s great.

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You Can Have My LM386s When You Pry Them From My Cold Dead Hands

December 7, 2016 by 137 Comments

Everyone has a chip-of-shame: it’s the part that you know is suboptimal but you keep using it anyway because it just works well enough. Maybe it’s not what you would put into a design that you’re building more than a couple of, but for a quick and dirty lashup, it’s just the ticket. For Hackaday’s [Adam Fabio], that chip is the TIP120 transistor. Truth be told, we have more than one chip of shame, but for audio amplification purposes, it’s the LM386.

The LM386 is an old design, and requires a few supporting passive components to get its best performance, but it’s fundamentally solid. It’s not noise-free and doesn’t run on 3.3 V, but if you can fit a 9 V battery into your project and you need to push a moderate amount of sound out of a speaker, we’ll show you how to get the job done with an LM386.

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Decabit: Or The Conspiracy Theory That Wasn’t

December 6, 2016 by 69 Comments

[LDX] first noticed the odd sounds coming out of his ceiling fan, regularly, on the hour and half-hour. Then he noticed that the lights were flickering as well. Figuring something was up, he built a logging power-line monitor to see if he could decode the shadowy signals and figure out what cryptic messages were being transmitted over the power lines. Naturally, he suspected the Illuminati were behind it.

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